What’s up w/ MoFo – March Update

Here is a brief Mozilla Foundation status update that I shared at this week’s board meeting.

During February, we narrowed in on areas where the current 3+ person Foundation team is making the most progress on. These are the areas where we currently think we can have the most impact in 2009. Here are some highlights:

Mozilla Education gaining early traction, but education web site still needs significant push.

Mozilla Research planning still moving slowly. Other programs on back burner for now.

mozilla.org redesign started in earnest. Has potential to attract volunteer energy to MoFo and help us tell a better Mozilla story.

Next quarter we hope that we can add fundraising w/ focus on social marketing, the accessibility program and Mozilla Research to the list of things we are actively moving forward. We may also be able to add more ‘community support’ programs in Q3.

Program Pilots and Planning

Most program effort going into Mozilla Education pilot, focused on giving people the skills to build and protect the open internet.

Interest in Seneca model growing at other colleges. New groups of students and professors contacting Dave Humphrey each week. Focus is mainly on Mozilla technologies and open source work methods.

Plans in place for six week online course teaching educators how to use open licensing and open web technologies in the classroom. Will be offered jointly w/ Creative Commons. Launches in April.

Next priority is to create a more effective education.mozilla.org web site. Needs to better communicate our strategy and provide resources useful to educators.

Next major program push is write up Accessibility Program strategy and share w/ MoCo as a way to test this idea.

The aim is to simultaneously move accessibility ahead, collaborating with MoCo and others.

Social Movement experiments on hold w/ Zak’s departure. May be better fit with general community and community efforts, as that’s where we’re getting traction (see below).

Mozilla Research planning efforts going slowly for now, waiting on Brendan and Mitchell.

Community and Communications

Revitalizing mozilla.org is primary focus here. Goal is to redesign, refactor content and turn into better home for future programs.

Potential to attract new volunteers to work on http://www.mozilla.org, which would strengthen MoFo team’s ability to work on community projects. This is a big priority.

Current phase: community engagement, visual redesign and some refactoring of content.

Next phase: improve navigation and findability; grow community of people working on the site; further improve content; and possibly replace tech underlying the site.

Also, helping Mozilla community marketing people with activities like local MozCamp events and Community Take Action Day.

Getting some traction here. This may be better approach to reaching new communities than what we were calling the ‘Social Movement program’.

Will continue to collaborate w/ community marketing people over next two months. Will then assess whether there is way for us to increase impact and involvement here.

Some planning under way on broader Community Support activities: eg. helping with community metrics and providing better support to the module owners process. Likely to move further once Gerv finishes university in June.